Seagate was the first hard drive manufacturer to launch a native SATA hard drive with the Barracuda 7200.7 but truth be told it wasn’t particularly fast or impressive. The 7200.8 update was the drive that the 7200.7 should have been, and now we have the 7200.9 which meets the SATA2.5 specification. The headline change is the move from a 150MB/sec interface to 300MB/sec but we all know that this will bring minimal benefit when you are running a single hard drive as 150MB/sec offers plenty of headroom. Instead we should concentrate on the less obvious changes such as the addition of Native Command Queuing which is intended to transfer data more quickly between the hard drive and processor.